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Notes
1 In Barry Eidlin, “Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Political Articulation and the Canadian Comparison, 1932 to 1948,” American Sociological Review, 81, no. 3, (June 2016): 488–516, the author contends that in the United States, the New Deal coalition undercut support for a labor party by incorporating farmer groups and labor unions. However, in Canada, the conventional political parties did not include farmers and labor which paved the way for their inclusion in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (1918–1944) was clearly the most successful radical political party at the state level in the United States. For an analysis of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, see Richard M. Valelly, Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
2 There have been many books written about the Labor Party across different time periods. Some of the better volumes include Matthew Worley, Labour Inside the Gate: A History of the British Labor Party between the Wars (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005) which is a complete and well-researched study of the Party during a crucial period of development. Paul Bridgen’s The Labour Party and the Politics of War and Peace, 1900–1924 (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell P. for the Royal Historical Society, 2009) is based on much archival research and discusses the Party’s foreign policy which is not covered in many volumes. An excellent book that covers the Labor Party during the Thatcher era of the 1980s and prior to the 1992 election is Eric Shaw, The Labour Party since 1979: Crisis and Transformation (London: Routledge, 1994) which argues that the Labor Party’s campaign strategy was extremely problematic in presenting itself as a party based on pragmatic modernization. Finally, in Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour: Politics after Thatcherism (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), the authors contend that the Labor Party offered a politics different from Thatcherism and the social democracy it had been advocating since World War II. A multitude of books also have been written about the German Social Democratic Party. Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955) is an excellent and classic study which discusses the division between reformers and revolutionaries in a critical period in the Party’s development between the two Russian revolutions. A few other notable works on German Social Democracy written in an earlier period include Roger Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International (London: Cambridge at the University Press, 1964); Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N. J.: Bedminster Press, 1963); Richard N. Hunt, German Social Democracy, 1918-1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); Lewis L. Edinger, German Exile Politics: The Social Democratic Executive Committee in the Nazi Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956); and Douglas A. Chalmers, The Social Democratic Party of Germany: From Working-Class Movement to Modern Political Party (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). In Donna Harsch, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), the author provides an excellent portrayal of Social Democracy’s organizations and ideology although she deemphasizes the attraction of skilled male workers to Nazism. A well-written and well-researched comparative study that covers both political parties is Stefan Berger, The British Labor Party and the German Social Democrats, 1900-1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
3 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, see Part 2: Key Issues for Labour Market and Social Policies, “Chapter 4: Trends in Trade Union Membership,” 101, https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/4358365.pdf (accessed November 23, 2020).
4 Lorenzo Bordogna and Gian Primo Cella, “Decline or Transformation? Change in Industrial Conflict and Its Challenges,” Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 8, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 589. For further support indicating the peak of strike trends in the article, see Table 1, “Levels and Shape of Strike Activity (Annual Averages 1950-1999),” 592 and Table 3, “Percentage of Days Lost in Manufacturing Industry on Total Days Lost (Annual Averages),” 601.
5 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Key Issues for Labor Market, “Chapter 4: Trends in Trade Union Membership,”101; Mario Izquierdo, Esther Moral and Alberto Urtasun, “Collective Bargaining in Spain: An Individual Data Analysis,” Documento Ocasional no 0302, Banco de España, Madrid, 2003, 7, https://www.bde.es/f/webbde/SES/Secciones/Publicaciones/PublicacionesSeriadas/DocumentosOcasionales/03/Fic/do0302e.pdf (accessed November 23, 2020).
6 Marcel van der Linden, “The Crisis of World Labor,” Against the Current, No. 176 (May/June 2015), https://againstthecurrent.org/atc176/p4424/ (accessed October 15, 2020).
7 van der Linden, “The Crisis of World Labor.”
8 Kim Moody, Tramps and Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migration and. Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. 330 pp. Hardback - $50.00; Paperback - $22.00; E-Book - $21.99); Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 432 pp. Hardback - $49.95); Toni Gilpin, The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020. 425 pp. Hardback - $42.25; Paperback - $21.95, E-Book - $20.00).
9 Although the Knights of Labor (KOL) was a US-based labor organization which reached its peak of strength in the 1880s, the KOL also operated and had chapters in Canada, Great Britain and Australia. There is a rich and voluminous literature containing many articles and books of a scholarly nature written on the KOL. Major books penned on the KOL in the United States include Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor's Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Discussions of the KOL in Canada, Great Britain and Ireland can be found in Gregory Kealey and Brian Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Steven Parfitt, Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). For a biography of Terence Powderly, the autocratic leader of the KOL from 1879 to 1893, see Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000).
10 The Fordist US employment pattern, also known as Fordism, can be defined as a 20th century system of mass production and mass consumption which incorporated the working class into capitalism while leading to several decades of industrial growth and stability into the early 1970s. Although Fordism originated in the United States, variants of Fordism also emerged in European countries. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, contended that since Fordism provided workers with high wages, this industrial system of production resulted in the forging of a class compromise in the workplace. For Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism, see Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” 277–318 in Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Howell Smith (Eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). A discussion of the working conditions in Ford Motor Company factories as well as the external control exerted on the production employees by Ford’s Sociological Department can be found in Stephen Meyer, The Five Dollar Day: Labor, Management, and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). The French Regulation School has argued that Fordism was essential for the construction of the Keynesian welfare state in the 20th century. Books written from this perspective include Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience (London: Verso Press, 1979); Alain Lipietz (Translated by David Macey), Mirages and Miracles: The Crises of Global Fordism (London: Verso, 1987); Alain Lipietz, Towards a New Economic Order: Post-Fordism, Ecology and Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992) and Bob Jessop, Fordism and Post-Fordism (Lancaster, UK: Lancaster Regionalism Group, 1991). For a discussion of how much the organization of work, including that found in the service industries, under the regime of post-Fordism appears to contain significant elements of Fordism, see Huw Beynon and Theo Nichols (eds). The Fordism of Ford and Modern Management: Fordism and Post-Fordism (Volumes I and II) (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006). Finally, a volume in which a psychiatrist attempts to develop a psychoanalysis of Taylorism but is unsuccessful while containing some useful information on Taylorism and Fordism is Bernard Doray (Translated by David Macey), From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association, 1988).
11 Having its roots in the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in the western United States, the WFM changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union in 1916 eventually organizing workers throughout the United States and Canada. The labor organization was popularly known as Mine, Mill. Articles written on Mine Mill’s activities in the United States include Robert S. Keitel, “The Merger of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers into the United Steel Workers of America,” Labor History, 15, no. 1 (1974): 36–43; Alan Draper, “The New Southern Labor History Revisited: The Success of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union in Birmingham, 1934-1938,” The Journal of Southern History, 62, no. 1 (February 1996): 87–108; and Laurie Mercier, “‘Instead of Fighting the Common Enemy’: Mine Mill versus the Steelworkers in Montana, 1950-1967,” Labor History, 40, no. 4 (1999): 459–80. Although there have not been any books written on Mine Mill and its activities in the United States, volumes have been penned on Clinton Jencks, a Mine Mill leader, during the late 1940s and 1950s. For two books on Jencks, see James J. Lorence, Palomino: Clinton Jencks and Mexican-American Unionism in the American Southwest, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Raymond Caballero, McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). A recently published article on Jencks is Michael Myerson, “The Legacy of Clinton Jencks,” Monthly Review, 71, no. 11 (April 2020): 45–52. Two books and an article written on Mine Mill in Canada include Mike Solski and Jon Smaller, Mine Mill: The History of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Canada - since 1895 (Ottawa, Canada: Steel Rail Publishing, 1984); Mercedes Steedman, Peter Suschnigg, and Dieter K. Buse (editors), Hard Lessons: The Mine Mill Union in the Canadian Labour Movement (Toronto and Oxford: Dundurn Press, 1995) and Ron Verzuh, “The Raiding of Local 480: A Historic Cold War Struggle for Union Supremacy in a Small Canadian City,” Labour/Le Travail, 82 (Fall 2018): 81–117.
12 First organized as the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing Allied Workers of America in 1937, the trade union became the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA) in 1944. Although there has been very little written about the FTA, an outstanding volume on the union is Robert R. Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
13 As with the FTA, not much of a scholarly nature has been published on the National Maritime Union (NMU). For a biography of Ferdinand Smith, a Jamaican-born founding member of the NMU in 1937 and a union leader until being expelled from the NMU in a 1948 anti-Communist purge, see Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Harry Haywood discusses his experience as an NMU member while a seaman in the Merchant Marines from 1943 to 1945 in the chapter entitled “World War II and the Merchant Marines,” 248–70 in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Harry Haywood, A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). In Donald T. Critchlow, “Communist Unions and Racism: A Comparative Study of the Responses of United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers and the National Maritime Union to the Black Question during World War II,” Labor History, 17, no. 2 (1976): 230–44, the author contends that while the NMU advocated for integration of Black and white workers on ships, it neither utilized radical nor militant means in trying to accomplish this goal.
14 For two other interesting articles on the FE that Gilpin does not cite in her volume, see Victor G. Devinatz, “A Cold War at International Harvester: The Shachtmanites and the Farm Equipment Workers Union's Demise, 1946-1955,” Science & Society, 72, no. 2 (April 2008): 182–207 and Steven Rosswurm and Toni Gilpin, “The FBI and the Farm Equipment Workers: FBI Surveillance Records as a Source for CIO Union History,” Labor History, 27, no. 4 (1986): 485–505.
15 There is a substantial literature devoted to the May 1886 Haymarket Square strike and the role of the anarchists in the work stoppage. For two of the best books on the subject, see Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) and James R. Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon, 2006). For two books which contain a more controversial analysis of the anarchists’ role in the Haymarket Square strike, see Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2011) and Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
16 Until the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, it was legal for employers to organize company unions which were labor organizations that were funded and controlled by companies. Besides being referred to as company unions, these labor organizations also went by the names of works councils and employee representation plans. Although company unions did not possess any independent collective bargaining power, they were an avenue for providing employees with voice through company union officials presenting employee complaints to management. According to a 1935 Twentieth Century Fund publication, by early 1935, there were 2.5 million company union members. For a variety of different interpretations and analyses of company unions, see Daniel Nelson, “The Company Union Movement, 1900–1937: A Reexamination,“ Business History Review, 56, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 335–57; Bruce Kaufman, “The Case for the Company Union,” Labor History, 41, no. 3 (2000): 321–50; Bruce Kaufman, “Divergent Fates: Company Unions and Employee Involvement Committees under the Railway Labor and National Labor Relations Acts,” Labor History, 56, no. 4 (2015): 423–58; Bruce E. Kaufman, “Experience with Company Unions and their Treatment under the Wagner Act: A Four Frames of Reference Analysis,” Industrial Relations, 55, no. 1 (January 2016): 3–39; Greg Patmore, “Employee Representation Plans in the United States, Canada, and Australia” Labor 3, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 41–65; Greg Patmore and Jonathan Rees, “Employee Publications and Employee Representation Plans: The Case of Colorado Fuel and Iron, 1915-1942,” Management & Organizational History, 3, nos. 3–4 (2008): 257–72; Jonathan Rees, “What If a Company Union Wasn't a 'Sham'? The Rockefeller Plan in Action,” Labor History, 48, no. 4 (2007): 457–75; Jonathan H. Rees, Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914-1942 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2010); Victor G. Devinatz, “‘Glorified Messengers for Management’ or ‘Legitimate Unionism’? An Analysis of Local Independent Unions in the Post-Company Union Era,” Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 18, no. 4 (December 2006): 231–47; and Victor G. Devinatz, “Reevaluating US Company Paternalism from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries,” Labor History, 53, no. 2 (2012): 299–304.
17 Charles Post, “The New Deal and the Popular Front: Models for Contemporary Socialists?” International Socialist Review, Issue 108, (March 2018), https://isreview.org/issue/108/new-deal-and-popular-front (accessed October 15, 2020); Charlie Post, “The Popular Front: Rethinking CPUSA History,” Against the Current, No. 63, (July/August 1996), https://againstthecurrent.org/atc063/p2363/ (accessed October 15, 2020). The quotations cited in the article appear in Post, “The New Deal and the Popular Front.”
18 Judith Stepan Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 299.
19 Norris and Zeitlin, Left Out, 307–08.